As climate changes, ‘100-year floods’ may happen every three to 20 years

By Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office13 February 2012 Last August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based […]

Texas drought: ‘This is the worst year ever for quality of deer, no question’

By Kim Gierke Special to the Standard-Times11 February 2012 SAN ANGELO, Texas – The West Texas deer season wrapped up in January and, as expected, it was the worst season in recent memory. The drought of 2011 had a devastating impact on the deer herd and forced hunters, guides and taxidermists to scramble to make […]

600 dead in record Europe freeze – Tens of thousands stranded by snow

By Sahit Muja, NY Economy and Politics Examiner11 February 2012 Europe’s record freezing temperatures have claimed hundreds of lives, snarled traffic and trapped hundreds of thousand of residents in remote villages . At least seven people died and three others were missing after an avalanche hit the village in Kosovo. There are reports of weather-related […]

Graph of the Day: Yale Environmental Performance Index for 132 Countries, 2000-2010

The 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and Pilot Trend EPI (Trend EPI) rank 132 countries on 22 performance indicators in ten policy categories and two overarching objectives that reflect facets of Environmental Health and Ecosystem Vitality. These indicators provide a gauge of how close countries are to environmental policy goals. The EPI’s proximity-to-target methodology facilitates […]

Earth Summit is doomed to fail, say leading ecologists – ‘We are not remotely on a course to be sustainable’

By Fred Pearce10 February 2012 LONDON – We can forget about fixing the planet’s ecosystems and climate until we have fixed government systems, a panel of leading international environmental scientists declared in London on Friday. The solution, they said, may not lie with governments at all. “We are disillusioned. The current political system is broken,” […]

The nexus of climate change and war – ‘We don’t want to be the generation that catches the final curtain on civilization’

By Randolph T. Holhut, American Reporter Correspondent11 February 2012 DUMMERSTON, Vermont – There is virtually no doubt that global warming exists. Aside from a few cranks and those heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry, the scientific consensus is that the Earth’s climate is changing, and changing faster than ever before. What happens when the […]

Wisconsin scientists to search 120 caves, mines for bats with lethal white-nose syndrome

MADISON, Wisconsin, February 9, 2012 (ENS) – Wisconsin bat scientists are going underground in February to search 120 caves and mines where bats hibernate for signs of the deadly fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome that has killed millions of bats in the eastern U.S. since 2006. While white-nose syndrome has not yet appeared in […]

New melt-rate estimate for glaciers is 30 percent lower than previous estimates, still ‘a large number, and represents a lot of melting ice’

By Michael Marshall, environment reporter9 February 2012 What on Earth is going on with the world’s glaciers? Reports today suggest that the Himalayan glaciers have not lost any [as much –Des] mass in the last decade [as previously thought –Des]. But while that comes as a real surprise, the global pattern remains basically the same. […]

Traditional Kenya weather forecasts fail with rapidly changing climate

By Abjata Khalif  3 February 2012 MARSABIT – Nomadic communities living off the dry terrain of northern Kenya have relied for generations on the powers of village elders to predict the weather. But the divinations of traditional forecasters were confounded by an unexpectedly severe drought in 2011, threatening herders’ livelihoods. Now pastoralists and meteorological experts […]

The forces of anti-science descend on Amazon.com: Michael Mann and the Climate Wars

As anyone with the slightest interest in Earth’s climate knows, the Merchants of Doubt have been hired by the fossil fuel industries to attack climate science, in the same way that the tobacco industry attacked studies linking smoking to lung cancer. For a neat graphical summary of the history of attacks on climate science, check […]

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